


Pax Fracta

by OpenPandorasBox



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-24
Updated: 2014-11-23
Packaged: 2018-02-26 19:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2664380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpenPandorasBox/pseuds/OpenPandorasBox
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After nearly a year of relative peace, Camp Jaha faces a new threat.  They've negotiated a fragile peace with the local Grounder clans and the few  who remain in Mt.Weather keep to themselves under heavy supervision by an allied guard force, but it isn't violence that threatens to destroy the tentative calm - it's disease.<br/>A Grounder village falls first.  Nearly half of their population dead or dying by the time their first riders can make it back with aid.  By then it's spread to neighboring villages.  Camp Jaha is not spared and weeks after they've cut off trade and visitations, the first begin to fall ill.  Slow, agonizing, and too often fatal, there is no cure.  Only the vain hope that strength alone will be enough to save them.<br/>Clarke finds records of similar outbreaks with the Grounder clans. She studies the countless medical journals and research from Mt. Weather in the hope that not all their scientific research was geared towards Frankensteinian medicine.  She finds no cure, but instead one journal of a scientist long since dead whose research was declared abhorrent even by Mt. Weather's standards, his work locked up deep in an old research facility.<br/>It could be their only chance to survive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pax Fracta

“Bellamy.  Shit!  Bellamy, hold still.”  Clarke pressed down hard against Bellamy’s shoulders as he bucked and fought to pull out of his restraints.  “Octavia?”  Clarke called out for the younger girl, tried to find her dark head amongst the cots, medical equipment, and prone bodies of all the other patients - too many patients.  Clarke’s head spun and hurt if she tried to think of all the friends of theirs who’d fallen ill over the last week.  She focused instead on the one seizing beneath her hands.  Bellamy’s skin burned against her palms, but she held on and called for Octavia once more.

“I’m here. I’m here,” Octavia declared breathlessly.  She fell to her knees beside Bellamy’s cot, her hands immediately settling on Bellamy’s chest to hold him down.

Clarke breathed out a sigh and spoke quickly. “I need you to keep him calm.  I can barely check his vitals when he’s fighting me like this let alone give him meds.  Talk to him, Octavia, please.”

“Okay, okay, okay.”  Octavia wiped the sweat off of her palms and pushed wet strands of hair off of her forehead with the back of her hand.  She palmed Bellamy’s face, her fingers digging lightly through the sweat-soaked her curling around his ears. “Relax, Bellamy. Please. Please relax. I’m here, okay? I’m here and I won’t let anyone hurt you, but you need to relax and let us help you.  Let Clarke help you.”

Breathing deep to steady herself, Clarke tuned out Octavia’s softly crooning voice and focused on what she’d started before Bellamy’s fevered hallucinations had interrupted.  She worked quickly to take his temperature, carefully drew a single tube of blood from his arm, and checked him over for any signs that the illness was advancing.  There were others whose gums had blackened and bled, whose eyes had turned yellow from jaundice, but Bellamy showed no other symptoms of progressing disease other than high fever, extreme fatigue and loss of consciousness, and delerium.

_Yet_ , Clarke thought darkly to herself, _he wasn’t showing signs of advanced disease yet_.  Her stomach clenched against the thought and she brutally forced it out of her mind as quickly as it had entered.  Eyes flitting back and forth to ensure no one watched, Clarke pulled a small bottle and fresh syringe from the bag she’d stuffed beneath Bellamy’s cot.

“Are you crazy?” Octavia hissed and Clarke startled.  The tip of the syringe skidded across the top of the bottle, but didn’t break. 

Clarke glared across Bellamy’s restless form. “He would want it to be him.  If it was going to be anyone, he’d want it to be him and you know it.”

Octavia shook her head violently, her long dark locks skidding across her cheeks and sticking to her flushed skin. “I know that,” she snapped back.  Realising her voice had risen and not wanting to be overheard, she leaned across her brother and grabbed Clarke’s wrist. “But we don’t know that it’s necessary yet, Clarke.  We don’t know what it will do to him.”

Clarke’s gaze shifted down to where Bellamy lay between them.  He’d calmed down since Octavia had arrived, but he was still shifting on his cot.  Pain, Clarke knew it for what it was.  He couldn’t get comfortable – his skin was hot to the touch, his muscles clenched tight and draining him of what energy he had.  His skin, usually tan and always darker than her own, was drained of all colour and clammy. 

He muttered to himself.  If she leaned down, held her ear next to his lips, maybe she’d hear what he said, but she knew she’d never understand it.  Eyes fluttering restlessly, waiting for a sleep that would never come, cheeks hollowed out, and lips rimmed in white from dehydration, Clarke knew that Bellamy didn't have much time.

“I know what will happen to him if we don’t.”  Clarke reached down to brush Bellamy’s hair back from where it stuck to his forehead.  He burned as if lit with an inferno at his core.  Clarke knew what this sort of fever could do to a person.  She couldn’t see it happen to Bellamy.  She wouldn’t.

Octavia’s grip tightened around Clarke’s wrist, her fingers turning white from the pressure. “Clarke, please.”

Clarke’s eyes, bright and blue and burning almost as hotly as the skin beneath her fingertips, snapped back to Octavia. “We promised him.”

“I know. I just-” Octavia sucked in a breath and squeezed her eyes shut.  When she opened them again, she met Clarke’s fierce stare with a strong one of her own.  “No.  You’re right.  I know you’re right.  Do it.”

She loosened her grip on Clarke’s wrist, allowed her hand to fall back down to rest on her brother’s heaving chest, and Octavia nodded tightly at Clarke.  Swallowing back the lump of terror that had lodged itself in her throat, Octavia held on to Bellamy’s shoulder, pushed him down gently when he began to shake violently and bit back the sob threatening to rip itself out of her chest.

Clarke pushed up the short sleeve of Bellamy’s shirt to clear his upper arm.  She gripped his arm tightly, felt the still-firm muscles wracked with tremors beneath her touch, and pressed the tip of the needle against the skin until it broke.  All things considered, she knew the pain of it must be nothing compared to the disease that wracked his body, but she mumbled an apology all the same and stroked his arm with the thumb of the hand holding him still.  She pulled the needle free after she’d plunged the whole of the syringe’s contents into his body and pressed a small clean rag to the puncture site.

“It’s done.”  Her head fell to his shoulder.  Her stomach threatened to rebel against her, her hands shook, and she heard the sob Octavia couldn’t hold back any longer rip itself free from the younger girl’s throat.  She whispered into his ear with her hands shaking around his arm and the syringe fallen and forgotten at her feet. “It’s done.”

“Clarke.” Octavia’s voice broke and she tried again. “Clarke, we need to move him.”

Blonde hair moved in the semblance of a nod against Bellamy’s chest, the strands of it brushing against his jaw.  “I know,” came the muffled response before Clarke pushed herself up and straightened.  “Stay with him.  I’ll tell Raven we’re going to need the cage.”

**Author's Note:**

> Full Disclaimer: I don't have nearly as much to write as I would (a) like or (b) think I do. But I love to do it and I enjoying putting those ideas into actual words. That said, this story will be written in a series of drabbles. I'd love to be able to put all the work into it that I know I should, but realistically don't have time for. And yet, the ideas eat at me. So if drabbbles instead of full chapters aren't your thing, I get that and it's ok. But if they are and you choose to stick around, I hope you get a kick out of it anyway.


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